I think I need to take back my previous criticism of Jonathan Franzen. The more I read about e-books the more serious I take the problem of permanence, which is the basis of his critique. Here, for example, is Nick Carr:
Because it lacks the necessity and the fixity of a print run, e-publishing once again can become an ongoing process rather than an event, which is likely to change the perceptions of writers and their collaborators. And when you change your perception of what you’re creating, you will also change how you create it. I think it’s fair to say that these kinds of shifts are subtle and play out over a long time, but in some ways the erosion of the sense of a written work’s completeness and self-containment may ultimately change literature as much as the underlying technological changes.
Last week, I snuck in one last paragraph into the book I wrote that’s coming out in September. While I thought that this new stuff really helped, I had to double-pinky-swear to my publisher that I wouldn’t do it again as they need to get a whole series of technical steps done in order to make their pre-publication deadlines. While some might be celebrating the ability to tinker with their work forever, I’m delighted to be done with it (except for the copy editing). I want to move on to the next project, not constantly rethink my old one forever. I’ve reached the end of the line.
What happens though if that line disappears entirely? Think of the possible abuses by publishers against authors that could come from constantly tinkering with books after they’ve been published. They could contractually obligate you to revise everything every couple of years. Isn’t that one of the most important reasons why everyone hates textbooks? If they mess with just a few of your words, would you even notice?
Your most devoted readers will. How do you teach a book that’s constantly changing? Aren’t Star Wars geeks everywhere viciously abusing George Lucas these days for messing with his movies thirty years after he released them? Why should it be any different with books?
If you didn’t recognize the “disaster of biblical proportions” reference in the last coupleof posts, it was indeed from Ghostbusters. In the scene above, that awful man from the EPA turned off Spengler’s ghost-trapping machine and the Ghostbusters are trying to explain to the mayor what’s about to happen as a result.
I love Ghostbusters for many reasons, but only in my most recent viewing did I realize that they were all failed academics. Toward the beginning of the film, there’s this great part where the dean comes in and kicks them off campus. [Obviously, they weren't tenured.] Therefore, I don’t even need to change much to make my extended Ghostbusters analogy fit online education.
Who, you might ask, is the equivalent of that awful man from the EPA in academia? I’ll go with Ayn Rand. Seriously, I don’t think anybody would ever have dreamed of bringing online classes to public higher education in America if it weren’t for gigantic cuts to state funding brought on by people with too much money who are desperate to keep even more. Their kids, after all, will never be learning online. That’s just for poor people who don’t need to understand the past for their future lives of service to our corporate overlords.
The setup of online courses is practically guaranteed to keep things that way. Another thing I learned at that AHA session last week is that you can’t test online students about historical facts because they can always Google anything. This is indeed strangely reminiscent of Nick Carr’s famous article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” but you don’t have to buy Carr’s premise in order to understand the problem here.
Suppose I want to quiz my online students on facts they learned on the web sites I sent them to throughout a particular section of the course. They have 15 minutes to finish the quiz. In the same time they can write what they actually learned, they can open up another tab on their browser, Google the question and write the answer whether they learned it when they were supposed to or not. As a college professor, I’m well aware that there are a lot more important things to learn in a good history class than a lot specific facts. However, I’ve also been involved in the TAH program for long enough to appreciate the benefits of historical knowledge for promoting good citizenship.
Moreover, students need to learn at least some facts, otherwise they won’t have any history at their disposal to analyze. I always tell my survey students that history is actually pretty easy when you realize that you can always remember the facts that you find most interesting in order to answer my very broad questions. Online history class, therefore, is like taking every test open-book. I’m not sure this means that Google is making us stupid, but it certainly decreases the incentive for history students to commit any historical facts to memory.
I think this kind of ignorance is going to haunt us all during our glorious online future. With the Ghostbusters struggling outside of academia along with the rest of us faculty, who we gonna call then?
In her year-end post, our pal Kate mentions my fondness for historical analogies. Her historical analogy in that post is union musicians protesting their replacement in movie theaters by pre-recorded tracks. While I love that story, I’m not sure it’s a good analogy for edtech as it has a happy ending. Theater owners (who were mostly the Hollywood studios at that time) make money, customers get cheaper movie tickets and the musicians’ union didn’t disband because there were still plenty of places for them to play live music. Indeed, I suspect if you work for the local in Nashville, LA or Vegas, you can make a fair chunk of change as a union musician still.
Speaking of Vegas, I was on my way to Christmas in Vegas with the family (not a bad idea at all, really) when I first read Kate’s post. In honor of that trip, I was reading Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley. That’s the second volume of a two-volume biography of THE KING. The first book, which I read years ago, is quite wonderful for understanding just how important Elvis was musically. The second is mostly depressing, like Nick Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, but still a great read.
I don’t remember most of them, but it’s clear from the book that Elvis movies are almost all pretty awful. Guralnick blames Elvis’ manager, Colonel Tom Parker, for that mostly. Early in the book, Guralnick explains the way Elvis’ contracts were structured. Elvis made between $750,000 and $1,000,000 per picture. That was almost as much as Hollywood’s top star at the time, Elizabeth Taylor. But then Elvis and Parker split 50% of everything the picture made after it earned back its costs. Since the kiddies were going to see Elvis in anything he did, that gave Elvis every incentive to make his pictures as fast and as slipshod as possible. The scripts were awful (Elvis played a race-car driver in three different movies), the music was often ill-chosen and he certainly never got a chance to develop as an actor.
So who did this hurt? Elvis, of course. Not financially. He made lots of money, but doing nothing but acting in movies with dumb stories and recording soundtrack albums with bad songs on them made him miserable. This is Guralnick, p. 207:
“It was clear that he himself was neither interested in, nor satisfied with, the music that was being released in his name, and for all the Colonel’s pep talks and recitations of figures and numbers, and deals, there was no getting past the fact that the records were no longer selling as they once had , they no longer mattered as they used to. He admired the Beatles, he felt threatened by the Beatles, sometimes it made him angry how disrespectful the Beatles and Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones were toward the public and their fans – but most of all he was envious of the freedom they evidently seemed to feel and to flaunt. He, too, had once enjoyed that freedom, he, too, had once been in the vanguard of the revolution, and now he was embarrassed to listen to his own music, to watch his own films.”
In case you’re wondering where I’m going with this, professors are Elvis. Students could be our adoring fans, but they’re being encouraged by the Colonel to demand the same bad movies over and over again. Take this particular money-making idea, for example:
MyEdu is an online tool aimed at helping students better plan and manage their college experience. It was originally founded in 2008 as Pick-a-Prof, a website that allowed students to rate their professors; the following year the Internet startup was rebranded as MyEdu and its mission became more comprehensive. Through tools that track students’ course requirements each semester, provide detailed degree planning and rate faculty members, the site aims to improve students’ return on education by increasing graduation rates and decreasing the time it takes to earn a diploma.
“Going to college is much like investing in your portfolio; you have to keep an eye on how much return you’re getting on your education investment,” says Frank Lyman, MyEdu’s senior vice president.
Is this really what we want to teach them? Now that President Romney has promised all our students jobs when they graduate, they’re going to end up being insufferable. Is going to college a good idea if you go for the wrong reasons? Here’s Guralnick quoting Elvis (p. 468) looking back on his film career, before the pills eventually killed him:
“It was a job. I had to be there at a certain time in the morning and work a certain amount of hours, and that’s exactly how I treated it.”
I think professors and students alike could learn a lot from Elvis’ experience. If you do what you love for the wrong reasons you will no longer love it.
You saw “WALL-E,” right? Everybody always gushes about the first forty minutes or so, the part set on the trashed future earth which feels like a Buster Keaton movie. My favorite part of the movie, however, takes place on that orbiting space colony of obese consumers. It’s when the captain runs a bit of dirt that dropped off WALL-E through the ship’s computer and as he gets the computer to define these terms he’s never heard of before, the computer gradually explains what earth used to be like. The captain then becomes determined to take his hover-chair bound passengers back to their home planet because of his growing obsession with dancing, farming and especially pizza. While a film about how awful it is to trash the earth isn’t all that radical in this day and age, a film about how we lose essential knowledge by letting technology do everything for us really is.
I thought of my favorite scene from WALL-E when I read Tenured Radical’s post about the need for the post office near Zenith to offer a sample filled-out envelope in order to illustrate to students there how to properly address snail mail:
This helpful aide, undoubtedly invented by our Zenith postal clerks in response to incoherently addressed envelopes, has truly convinced me that the US Postal Service will die. It has been generationally lapped by the digital world and it may, in fact, simply disappear as an institution in my lifetime.
That would be a shame, as despite the increasing percentage of junk mail in my mail box over the last few years, real hand-written letters do have their quaint charms. So does e-mail, the danger to which I can attest to from direct experience. Indeed, I have to come close to threatening my now 18-year-old daughter with bodily harm in order to get her to check her inbox despite the fact that that’s the way that her college acceptance letters are going to be delivered any day now.
In a similar vein, the nice folks at New Faculty Majority alerted me to this rather cute meme on Twitter that imagines a world where pencils are re-introduced into school classrooms as a new technology. This is from a blog post that breaks that 140 character wall:
Then there are the objections from the Tax Payers Alliance, and other pressure groups who have even gone on to the local TV station to complain that we are being irresponsible, and are wasting valuable tax payers money on purchasing a pencil for every child. ‘In my day’, said the TPA spokeperson, ‘we used slates and styluses, and shared them around, and we were happy. One pencil per child is simply a gimmick’. To be blunt, I think they are missing the point. I strongly believe that pencils are the future of learning, and the more untethered they are, the greater will be the flexibility of learning for all subjects across the curriculum.
Don’t you think it’s funny that in all this talk about progress, nobody in the edtech world wants to think about what is getting lost? Maybe we can we keep a “seed” bank somewhere so that we can revive perfectly good education ideas after they go extinct, the same way that those hover-chair people in WALL-E learned how to walk again.
The terrible thing about species extinctions is, of course, that they’re never coming back. As I understand it, after the last dodo died in 1662, people doubted whether such a creature ever even existed. Only after Lewis Carroll put one in Alice in Wonderland did the dodo begin to find its now firmly-entrenched spot in western culture as a symbol for extinction. Too bad there weren’t even any stuffed dodos left to give people a feel for what the world had actually lost.
If you pay close attention to the movie, you’ll see that the kids on that colony in WALL-E are being taught by a machine. I think the one line that their robot teacher delivers is something like, “Buy ‘n Large is your best friend.” Will that be on the (inevitably standardized) test?
I wonder if we as a society will remember enough about how teaching used to be in order to do it well again after education becomes the exclusive online purview of the Buy ‘n Large Corporation.
When my friend Richard Facebooked “Salt of the Earth (1954)” over the weekend, I almost lost it. For one thing, here was one of the best labor movies ever made entirely online. For another thing, the ENTIRE thing was on YouTube. I had never seen that before.
Then I went to the channel where the movie was posted, and lost it again. Cinevault’s Openflix is an absolute treasure trove of old movies in their entirety. Sure, some of them probably stink, but I’ve seen enough excellent ones there to know there’s a lot of gems too like the best Frank Capra film ever made, “Meet John Doe (1942). Then there’s this piece of great timing, “Royal Wedding (1951).” and more Charlie Chaplin films than I’ve ever seen for free in one place. Mostly it’s shorts, but they also have “The Kid (1921).”
Lord, I’m going to have to stop sleeping now in order to get anything done.
Classic Cinema Online. The only problem is that the videos I want to see most, “Freaks” and “Meet John Doe,” don’t seem to be available anymore. Heaven knows I’ll find something though.
Update: It appears both those movies areelsewhere.
I saw “Capitalism: A Love Story” on Thursday and was pleasantly surprised to see this:
In the film he interviews several Catholic priests, who explain their belief that capitalism and the free market, by emphasising greed and the self over community, go against the Bible’s basic tenets. One priest, Dick Preston, tells Moore: “Capitalism is evil, immoral and contrary to the teachings of Jesus.” Moore also describes his own Catholic upbringing and includes a skit where free-market slogans are dubbed inappropriately – and hilariously – over scenes from a movie of Jesus’s life.
It appears that these scenes have given rise to a historical teachable moment:
Though recent US political history seems to have been dominated by the rise of evangelical conservatism and its powerful grip on the Republican party, there is a parallel tradition of leftwing priests in America, especially with Catholics. “Catholics have always had a strong tradition in labour and union issues in America. There is not much in laissez-faire capitalism that is actually backed up by Catholic teaching,” said Professor David O’Brien, a faith and culture expert at the University of Dayton, Ohio.
Cardinal James Gibbons was a famous advocate of union rights in the early 20th century. Daniel and Philip Berrigan were brothers and radical priests who opposed the Vietnam war. The black civil rights movement was led by clergy, most famously by Dr Martin Luther King.
You know historical understanding has gotten to a low point in this country when someone has to remind us that Martin Luther King was actually a reverend.
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